iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.
Nope. Not even remotely. Only if your taste in music is very narrow.
Just this weekend I tried to buy some Christmas songs that were popular and common on the radio in the 80's. I could only find about half of them on Amazon or Apple Music.
Most had some version available, but not the canonical one I grew up with. Some didn't exist at all.
They even think they can exert rights over used album sales. As one example, pretty much all recordings that have rights attributed to an artist named Al Reed, who died in 1990, are blocked for sale on Discogs. Not just his own recordings, pretty much anything he has writing credit for. https://www.discogs.com/artist/623314-Al-Reed
>The volume of music available for an average person anywhere in the world to purchase today is many orders of magnitude greater than any era in the past.
You are 100% correct. But not for the reasons you imply. Music recording is just barely 120 years old, and mass market music media sales are, perhaps 75-80 years old.
And since many of those recordings are still around, with more music being recorded every year, it's no wonder there's more music available now than there ever has been.
That said, Sturgeon's Law[0] applies to music as well as everything else.
Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms.
Analog hole.
It takes a bit of time, but if you really care about the music, it's worth it.
Note: I suspect that the streaming services watermark the songs. I have some from Apple Music that it refuses to sync over its cloud service. Doesn't bother me, though, because I primarily sync via wire.
Just the use of the word "shipped" implies that software is an interchangeable commodity that rolls off a conveyor belt in a factory.
That's not the reality with any software that actually matters, no matter how hard M.B.A.s try to abstract the human factor out of it.
Good software isn't manufactured. It's created. It takes thinking, and planning, and crafting, and all those things that are the opposite of a plastic widget factory that "ships" products to its customers.
Don't let then dehumanize the profession any more than it already is.
Most commercially written software is closer to manufacturing than art. That doesn't satisfy everyone, I know, and I'm not here to judge people who don't want to work on integration #5 for widget #3 in order to unblock a million dollar contract from Foobar Inc. But that's where a substantial majority of the market demand for software development lies. The MBAs are paid precisely for their ability to channel the creative process of software development into the manufacturing slots where it's needed.
(Even art, of course, is in practice pretty close to this. MBAs are paying you to sublimate your creative energies into a snappy video on how to sign up for Robinhood or whatever, and there are substantial business constraints on both its content and delivery date.)
It's closer to engineering than either art or working on an assembly line. Software tasks just aren't fungible in most companies, and neither are they open-ended interpretable works designed to please or strike fear into the human soul. The average codebase is pleasing to me in the way an engine block or an oil refinery is pleasing. Q_rsqrt is pleasing in the way a mathematical proof is pleasing.
I’ve worked in engineering businesses, and SaaS scale ups and the “engineering” that gets done by SWEs had little to nothing in common with any of the engineering disciplines I’ve worked in apart from the E in the title.
Little comprehension about cost engineering, maintenance, safety, durability and resilience. Half-baked bodies of knowledge. CV driven development. Fads and critical production systems held together with spit, tape and hope. It’s like Aristotle’s Cave in our field.
When you ship it is arts and crafts which usually leans heavily to a small group of people Then if you want it to be commercial succesfully it needs some manufacturing practices because otherwise, you end up with legacy software.
I don't know why this post is getting down voted but the MBAization is truly it.
MBA practices cannot deal with uncontrollable production. But software engineering is utter chaos. So they try to come up with bullshit units that can be easily managed in their opinion. But it never works - aka, a nimble competitor always eats the giant in software.
The MBA style practice does work in factories and warehouses. But in software, a nimble startup with own the incumbent just be providing higher quality value.
Note that this may make major purchases more complex in the future.
You may not remember to opt back in to the "service" a certain number of months before you buy a car, for example. Then you're stuck either paying a higher interest rate because the lender sees you as riskier without a trusted method of verifying income, or you have to do a bunch of paperwork with the seller or finance company may or may not be willing to deal with.
Where? If you want that to be partial evidence, you have to parse that sentence as:
(they’re randomly networking and intentionally rebooting) to thwart this specific law enforcement attack
which means
(they’re randomly networking to thwart this specific law enforcement attack) AND (they’re intentionally rebooting to thwart this specific law enforcement attack)
All you show is that they’re randomly networking, not that it’s for thwarting even any law enforcement attacks, so I don’t think what you say is partial evidence.
Well you could use the information that you just accepted is collected to identify which phones are in custody by the police, which phones have been stolen, lost or left without a user - that's all very easy actually considering the apple network and the number of their devices.
Having a few lines of code to dictate what happens once a phone has been identified as any of the above is pretty simple stuff.
I think this restart is for Apple - an easy attempt to restore the devices network connection (and the data stream from it) and has little or nothing to do with law enforcement originally but now Apple will say that's the whole entire reason this exists bc privacy.
Anyways, it was absolutely relevant info to the article and considering it and more - it's obvious that Apple could have done this, or something like it, to thwart cops but is very unlikely.
I think the web really needs some "decluttering". The ratio of processing power by useful payload nowadays is unsustainable.
I completely agree. However, I think browsers are also to blame in some part.
On web sites that I build, I sometimes get alerts from Safari that my page is bogging down the computer and it offers to "reduce protections" to make the page perform better. But this is always on pages that are plain HTML and CSS, and don't even have animations. No Javascript. No canvas. Not even forms. And the total payload is often less than 20K.
I don't know what else I can do to make it lighter.
A scary version of this is driven home to me when I go to Washington DC and see all of the very expensive billboards at commuter stations near the Pentagon advertising fighter jets and other military equipment.
It scares me every time because they wouldn't be splashing out the big bucks for those billboards if they weren't effective, and I absolutely don't want the military (or any other entity engaging in major expenditures) to be making those decisions based on billboards.
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